Karen Holden
Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Consumer Science
Email: holden@lafollette.wisc.edu
Office: Consumer Science, 3rd Floor Middleton Building, 1305 Linden Drive
Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin - Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1211
Karen Holden is Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and
Consumer Science. She is a Research Associate of the Institute for Research on Poverty and a Faculty Affiliate and Steering Committee member at the
Center for the
Health and Demography of Aging, and the
Center for Demography and Ecology.
She was Associate Director of La Follette in 1995-98 and 2005-07. Her
research focuses on the effects of social security and pension policy
on economic status after retirement and widowhood. Previous work has
examined issues in the areas of disability, welfare reform, mandatory
retirement policies, and risk of nursing home care. In 1986-87 she was
a visiting economist at the Social Security Administration's Office of
Research and Statistics.
Professor Holden's current
projects include an examination of the adequacy of retirement savings
and correlates of changes in adequacy over time; happiness and
financial well-being; evaluation of financial literacy programs; and
development of financial education programs for young children. She
served on the National Academy of Social Insurance Task Force that
examined payout issues should there be individual social security
accounts. The report, "Uncharted
Waters: Paying Benefits from Individual Accounts in Federal Retirement
Policy," is informing the policy debate on Social Security
reform. She received her B.A. degree in Economics from Barnard College and
her doctorate in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Representative Publications:
Early Life Schooling and Cognition & Late Life Financial Literacy in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study
Theories of Human Behavior and Emotions - What they Imply About the Financial Behavior of Vulnerable Populations